Confession: I love Auditorium.

Here’s the thing: I’m not really a hip-hop head. I don’t have a vast encyclopedia of knowledge of beats, rhymes and tracks of everything produce over the past 30 years. I know certain songs from memory because the beat was so sick it moved me, or the lyricism was so ill I couldn’t possibly ignore it. So I know some rhymes that are part of the basic lexicon of hip hop (Paid In Full, Rappers Delight, The Message, The Show, Children’s Story) as well as some recent classics from MCs like Black Thought, Eminem, Jay-Z, Biggie… I like what I like and I listen to it religiously.

For instance, I understood the importance of learning every single word to Lose Yourself and Lost Ones.  And I was so far from being a teenager but when the shit’s hot, you got act like you know, right?  But I’m really a girl from the Midwest and we love beats.  I like to believe this is a universal known about our creed. If the beat isn’t dope, I’m not really paying attention to it. Seduce my ear with a pulsing bass line that I can feel in my chest, and you got me. Lyricism is icing on the fucking cake. On the real, why I’ve listened to Mos Def’s Auditorium from his album, The Ecstactic, an embarrassing number of times simply stem from nostalgia for brilliant lyricism juxtaposed against melodic tones and break beats.

I geeked out about this with a couple of friends after brunch a while ago (What up Mara and Elon?) Have you heard Slick Rick’s (aka The Ruler) rhyme on this track (2:35)? Seriously, check it:

Sit and come relax riddle off the mac, it’s The Patch
I’mma soldier in the middle of Iraq
Well say about noonish commin out the whip
And lookin’ at me curious, a young Iraqi kid
Carrying laundry, What’s wrong G? hungry?
No, gimme oil or get fuck out my country
And in Arabian barkin’ other stuff
Till his moms come grab him and they walk off in a rush

Distrust, bitter like pissed up old wound
I’m like Shorty I hope that we can fix our differences soon (bye!)
Buying apples I’m breakin’ on
You take everything why not just take the damn food …
I don’t understand it, on another planet?
51 of this stuff how I’m gonna manage?
And increasing the sentiment gentlemen
Gettin’ down on that middle eastern instruments
Realized trapped in this crowd
Walked over kicked one of my fabulous raps (Lottie Dottie)
I ripped, their jaw dropped, they well-wished, they glad-hand
Now the kid considered like an Elvis of Baghdad

It’s a perfectly crafted short short story. A dirty realist story, perhaps? It’s such an authentic record of our times–  this clash between culture and civilizations. That simple turn and reversal at the end? Our narrator was able to bridge the divide. What more can you ask from a short story that reflects this reality yet leave you with joy at our shared humanity? Music is a common language.

I think that’s why I’m having such a hard time accepting the new kids (Drake, Nicki) right now. The absence of lyricism in their work is hard to take. But on some level, I sort of understand the appeal. Language is relational. There’s something to be said for simple semiotics Drake uses, his short hand to convey sentiment and feeling across to a listener (‘I can teach you how to speak my language. Rosetta Stone.’) *shrug* I guess. He’s like the audible version of Family Guy. Which if you’ve watched you know exactly what I mean. There’s barely any connected sequence of original situations, and often relies on references from our collective pop culture memory to render scene and feeling.

Certainly, there’s room for the mash-up in storytelling. George Saunders’ story Jon comes to mind. In a not too distant future, we encounter a narrator whose language is a catalog of semiotics, shared pop culture memories of television and commercials. The syntax is an amalgamation of perceived experiences supplanting actual experience.

Then came the final straw that broke the back of me saying no to my gonads, which was I dreamed I was that black dude on MTV’s Hot and Spicy Christmas (around like Location Indicator 34412, if you want to check it out) and Carolyn was the oiled up white chick, and we were trying to earn the Island Vacation by miming through the ten Hot ‘n’ Nasty Positions before the end of ‘We Three Kings,’ only then sadly, during Her On Top, Thumb In Mouth, her Elf Cap fell off, and as the Loser Buzzer sounded she bent low to me saying, Oh Jon, I wish we did not have to do this for fake in front of hundreds of kids on Spring Break doing the wave but instead could do it for real with just each other in private.

And then she kissed me with a kiss I can only describe as melting.

A whole meta language is introduced and you sort of resist it, yet somehow, the emotional core anchors it and you accept the voice, surrender to it even.  I feel the same way about break beats, and trick camera work. They’re jarring in the beginning, your brain isn’t even sure how to process it, but the repetition of it keeps you grounded and slowly you allow yourself to accept the idea of another world.

Darren Aronofksy’s adaptation of the Hubert Selby novel, Requiem for A Dream, used a similar short hand, applying a quick succession of images to advance story. I went to a screening of that film in 2000 where the director talked specifically about this choice. ‘I borrowed from hip-hop,’ he said. He also said that he didn’t need to show the actors shooting up, but rather show the fragments, the aspects of the act of shooting up heroin and trust that the audience is smart enough to follow the narrative thread.

I don’t mean to defend Drake’s brand of rap, or Lil Wayne for that matter, who’s totally a stream of consciousness MC (well, I can sort of defend Lil Wayne over Drake. And all of this is coming from me is like… hella weird for those of you who know me. I still think Drake is like a MC-whack MC for the record and Em, Black Thought, Mos can eat him for lunch with a splash of hot sauce. Weezy actually snacks on Drake meat if he can’t get beignets, washes him down with unicorn milk, but that’s besides the point.) All of this is to say that I hope hip hop doesn’t lose or surrender story for the sake of short hand, quippy one-liners that live like orphaned children or free radicals in the atmosphere.